This well-informed and deeply personal account analyzes bushfires from various angles and examines the possibility of limiting their disastrous effects. With fires being a constant and ongoing part of Australian history, ecology, and culture, this study shows that, despite repeated disasters throughout the last two centuries, surviving bushfires today has become no easier than during the first European settlements. With rigorous factual research, this record outlines Australia’s significant fires and discusses the aftermath of each. Topics also include climate change, arson, fire behavior, firefighting strategies, and the psychology of survival.

Over Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer bushfire season, scientists estimate that more than three billion native animals were killed or displaced. Many species - koalas, the regent honeyeater, glossy black cockatoo, the platypus - are inching towards extinction at the hands of mega-blazes and the changing climate behind them. In Flames of Extinction, award-winning science writer John Pickrell investigates the effects of the 2019-2020 bushfires on Australian wildlife and ecosystems. Journeying across the firegrounds, Pickrell explores the stories of creatures that escaped the flames, the wildlife workers who rescued them, and the conservationists, land managers, Aboriginal rangers, ecologists and firefighters on the front line of the climate catastrophe. He also reveals the radical new conservation methods being trialled to save as many species as possible from the very precipice of extinction.

During its more than 50-year history, NASA's success in human space exploration has depended on the agency's ability to effectively address a wide range of biomedical, engineering, physical sciences, and related obstacles. This achievement is made possible by NASA's strong and productive commitments to life and physical sciences research for human space exploration, and by its use of human space exploration infrastructures for scientific discovery. Research for a Future in Space: The Role of Life and Physical Sciences explains how unique characteristics of the space environment can be used to address complex problems in the life and physical sciences. This booklet also helps deliver both new knowledge and practical benefits for humankind as it embarks on a new era of space exploration. Research for a Future in Space: The Role of Life and Physical Sciences is based on the in depth report, Recapturing a Future for Space Exploration: Life and Physical Sciences Research for a New Era. To learn more about the future of space exploration, visit our catalog page and download this report for free.

Shaped by fire for thousands of years, the forests of the western United States are as adapted to periodic fires as they are to the region's soils and climate. Our widespread practice of ignoring the vital role of fire is costly in both ecological and economic terms, with consequences including the decline of important fire-dependent tree and undergrowth species, increasing density and stagnation of forests, epidemics of insects and diseases, and the high potential for severe wildfires. Flames in Our Forest explains those problems and presents viable solutions to them. It explores the underlying historical and ecological reasons for the problems associated with our attempts to exclude fire and examines how some of the benefits of natural fire can be restored Chapters consider: the history of American perceptions and uses of fire in the forest how forest fires burn effects of fire on the soil, water, and air methods for uncovering the history and effects of past fires prescribed fire and fuel treatments for different zones in the landscape Flames in Our Forest presents a new picture of the role of fire in maintaining forests, describes the options available for restoring the historical effects of fires, and considers the implications of not doing so. It will help readers appreciate the importance of fire in forests and gives a nontechnical overview of the scientific knowledge and tools available for sustaining western forests by mimicking and restoring the effects of natural fire regimes.

A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together over time—and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before it's too late.​ The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished. Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic force by cooking the planet. Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures. Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down when people began to burn fossil biomass—lithic landscapes—and humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene yielded to the Pyrocene. Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.

Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

A New York Times Bestseller • A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, TIME, The A.V. Club, Buzzfeed, and PopSugar “I can’t believe how good this book is.... It’s wholly original. It’s also perfect.... Wilson writes with such a light touch.... The brilliance of the novel [is] that it distracts you with these weirdo characters and mesmerizing and funny sentences and then hits you in a way you didn’t see coming. You’re laughing so hard you don’t even realize that you’ve suddenly caught fire.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of The Family Fang, a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with a remarkable ability. Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help. Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth. Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for? With white-hot wit and a big, tender heart, Kevin Wilson has written his best book yet—a most unusual story of parental love.